[alaskamiller]

Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon.

Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.

Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.

The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.

[brandall10]

Xbox and Surface have been around a long time as product categories. Xbox isn't even the premier device in its segment.

Highly doubt MS will ever be successful on mobile... their last OS was pretty great and they were willing to pay devs to develop, they just couldn't get it going. This is from someone who spent a ton of time developing on PocketPC and Windows Mobile back in the day.

Products are not the reason for their resurgence.

Apple makes a ton in services, but their R&D is heavily focused on product and platform synergy to that ecosystem extremely valuable.

[alaskamiller]

Microsoft grinds constantly and consistently though, sprinkled with some monopolistic tendencies now and then to clinch a win.

I think the grind from Windows CE to Windows Phone is just a blip to them for now.

[ekianjo]

MS products all suck. They only survive because they throw billions at them and dont care about profitability.

Microsoft is still the same old Microsoft

[ethbr1]

Afaict, Windows Phone mostly failed because of timing. In the same way that XBox mostly succeeded because of timing. (In the sense that timing dominated the huge amount of excellent work that went into both)

Microsoft is a decent physical product company... they've usually just missed on the strategic timing part.

[Wazako]

It's not a question of timing, but of Microsoft's brand image (Internet Explorer) and the fact that Android was already open source.